Simon Cox Blog: Died: Chuck Murphy, Visionary Who Gave Conservative Anglicans a New Home

Tuesday 23 January 2018

Died: Chuck Murphy, Visionary Who Gave Conservative Anglicans a New Home

Founder of Anglican Mission in the Americas partnered with Rwanda to create US alternative to The Episcopal Church.

Charles H. Murphy III, retired bishop and founder of the Anglican Mission in the Americas (AMiA), died Jan. 9 of brain cancer at his home in Litchfield Plantation, South Carolina. He was 70.

Through his organization, created in response to liberal drift in the mainline Episcopal Church, Murphy gained acclaim from conservative Christians for taking a public stand against liberal theology that rejected the authority of Scripture, the divinity of Christ, and other orthodox doctrines. AMiA provided a new institutional home to marginalized conservative Christians, churches, dioceses, and bishops in the US and Canada.

“Chuck was an astonishingly eloquent speaker and expositor of the gospel,” FitzSimons Allison, who served as Murphy’s bishop in South Carolina, told CT. “He got many invitations to speak. He was billed as a person who helped raise money, but actually he was preaching the gospel, including generosity. He did it so well that there were clergy who disliked him and jealous of success. He could preach the horns off a billy goat.”

At that time, Murphy was rector of All Saints’ in Pawleys Island, South Carolina, growing the congregation to become one of the largest Episcopal parishes in the region.

By September 1997, Murphy and other conservative Episcopal clergy believed that their denomination had thoroughly embraced false doctrine and was resistant to reform. These clergy drafted and signed the First Promise statement. It declared the church had “departed from ‘the doctrine, discipline, and worship of Christ as this church has received them,’ and we declare their authority to be fundamentally impaired, and that they are not upholding the truth of the gospel.”

“The ...